Technological advances in computer hardware, software and networking have lead to efficient, cost effective computing systems (e.g., desktop computers, laptops, handhelds, cell phones, servers, . . . ) that can communicate with each other from essentially anywhere in the world in order to exchange information. These systems continue to evolve into more reliable, robust and user-friendly systems. As a consequence, more and more industries and users are purchasing computers and utilizing them as viable electronic alternatives for communicating with disparate users at remote locations, gathering information (e.g., from disparate users), retaining information, etc.
Recently, email usage has grown in popularity as a common manner by which users communicate with each other. Email allows for composing, sending, and receiving electronic communications. Transmission of email across the Internet, for instance, can be in accordance with the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which is a text-based protocol where one or more recipients of a message can be specified and the message can be transferred. The email message can be formatted according to the standard described in RFC 822 (and/or RFC 2822). Messages defined pursuant to RFC 822 (and/or RFC 2822) typically include two sections. The first section relates to headers that can comprise a message summary, sender, receiver, and other information concerning the email. For instance, headers can include a name and a value defined pursuant to the syntax specified by RFC 822 (and/or 2822). The second section can be associated with a body, which can be the message itself. RFC 822 (and/or RFC 2822) commonly relates to simple text email written in 7-bit US-ASCII. For example, the headers can be simple text strings such as the subject of the email, structured composite headers such as a recipient list, well defined headers, and arbitrary headers.
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an extension to RFC 822 (and RFC 2822) that can support transferring additional kinds of information in email. For instance, MIME can support nesting and relational representations of multiple payloads (e.g., a body with a number of attachments). Additionally, MIME can provide multiple character set support, content language annotation, content transfer encoding schemes and an increased number of well defined headers and associated meanings. MIME enables these additional functionalities while still being considered a valid RFC 822 (and/or 2822) payload.
As noted above, MIME can be employed in connection with email communication. MIME can also be leveraged for various other purposes. For instance, MIME can be employed in connection with form submissions for web based browsers. Thus, MIME can enable packaging responses for HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) form submissions when providing (e.g., posting) information to a web site. Additionally, MIME can be utilized as a format for storage of content (e.g., a document that can be created via utilizing a word processing application and can be stored in a web format). As such, usage of MIME is becoming more prevalent; however, viewing and/or editing MIME content is difficult utilizing conventional techniques.